


...or perhaps like this

by elizajane



Category: Foyle's War
Genre: Blizzards & Snowstorms, Cuddling & Snuggling, M/M, Pre-Slash, Sharing a Bed, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 10:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5371616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He hasn’t wanted anyone to keep him warm in bed at night since Rosalind. Until Paul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	...or perhaps like this

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Snow Falling Faintly](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5275058) by [Crowgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowgirl/pseuds/Crowgirl). 



> This fic is a fanwork for both _Foyle’s War_ and Crowgirl’s Welcoming Silences 'verse and her own contribution to the snowstorm challenge (see above). Thank you, darling, for sharing.
> 
> CONTENT NOTE: In the fifth section there's some description Rosalind's death and the immediate aftermath.

“You’ll be welcome to stay, of course,” Mrs. Dalby says, drying her hands on her apron. He and Milner are standing the farmhouse kitchen peering out into the blowing squall of snow. Across the yard they can barely see where the two farm hands, Doris and Judy, have emerged from the evening’s milking to join Sam in consideration of the snow-covered car and the icy ruts of the drive now dangerously coated with white. Here at the house, the windowsill above the slate sink has already drifted over with at least three inches of heavy white powder, climbing up the windowpane in what would be picturesque peaks if they weren’t a half-hour’s drive from Hastings along narrow, back-country roads.

Judy comes back across the yard as Sam and Doris disappear into the barn. Foyle hears her stomping out of her wellies as she comes up the back steps and blows through the door. She’s followed in by a swirl of flakes and a shivering draft of late November air that causes the big kitchen range to flare beneath the pot of potato and onion soup.

“They best not take the road t’night, Mrs. D,” she says with the certainty of a girl accustomed to handling the tractor on muddy, frozen fields. “Risk driving right off into the sea, they would.” Foyle can hear the Welsh lilt in her accent and wonders where she lived before being sent here to work on the Dalby’s dairy farm. Judy and Doris have been here since the previous spring, assigned by the Women’s Land Army after Mr. Dalby shipped off to North Africa. It was Doris he and Milner had come to see, about her brother who’d disappeared from a training barracks in Norfolk. Foyle had received a telephone call that morning, a colleague of his, asking might he be able to speak with the girl, see if anything seemed amiss.

It had been almost immediately clear in their earlier interview with Doris that the girl hadn’t seen her brother since he’d been called up. She had been wary, and short in her responses to their questions, suggesting the brother’s -- Geoffrey’s -- behavior was not wholly unexpected. But Foyle saw no reason to doubt her truthfulness when she told them her last contact with Geoff had been a letter received Tuesday last, which she retrieved from her room to show them.

_...Rumor is we’re to be sent out before Christmas, Dorrie. I can’t say more (and don’t know much anyway). The mood has become a somber one, as all the lads know our chances of returning home are poor at best…_

Not surprising that the reality of what he was about to do had gotten to the young man; he was not the first and would not be the last. Foyle had passed the letter to Milner who had read it silently and then tucked it back into its envelope and returned it to Doris.

“You got any more questions, then?” She’d asked. “The cows’ll want milking soon.”

“Thank you, no.” Foyle had said, capping his pen and tucking his notebook back in his breast pocket, “You’ve been most helpful.”

She’d paused at the door, “You’ll let me know if -- if they find him?”

“We will, Miss Ellison,” Paul had promised. And she had nodded, once, slipping away.

They had found Sam in the kitchen drinking tea with Mrs. Dalby, who was between kneading the loaves of rye bread now resting near the cast iron range and sliding them into the oven. When Foyle and Paul appeared in the doorway Mrs. Dalby had risen to offer them a cup, stepping back to the stove to freshen the pot from a kettle just off the boil.

Which is how they’d ended up stranded in the twilight of a late November afternoon, with a good four inches of fresh snow on the ground, and more falling by the minute.

“Frances!” Mrs. Dalby calls through the kitchen door into the hall to her elder daughter, “Set another three places at the table please -- the police’ll be staying for supper!”

* * *

After they’ve eaten, Foyle asks to use the telephone and calls the station to let the sergeant on duty know they won’t be back until the morning. Paul and Sam offer to wash the dishes much to the delight of the two Dalby girls, to whom the task usually fell. Doris, still subdued by the news they’d brought, drifts off into the sitting room to turn on the wireless while the other two women clear the table, chatting among themselves and with Paul and Sam who have fallen into an easy rhythm of camaraderie in the face of unexpected and mild hardship. As he hangs up the telephone in the hall, Foyle hears Sam suggesting cards and Judy’s voice respond in eager agreement.

Foyle follows the sound of the wireless into the sitting room, where the children are putting a puzzle together near the fire while the Home Service gives updates from Coventry, a reporter on the scene broadcasting from the ruined cathedral. Doris is in a straight-backed chair knitting what looks to Foyle like a rather large and lumpy sock.

He pauses at the children’s table and studies the jigsaw puzzle, which appears to be photograph of kittens arranged at a table having tea. “May I?” he asks, and Frances points him toward the small pile of pieces they’ve set aside to fill in the monochromatic grey background.

“Their names are Buzz, Fuzz, Suzz, and Agamemnon,” Rosie tells him, pointing to each of the kittens in turn.

He places a handful of pieces, filling in the area with no visual cues that the girls had been struggling with, and then -- not wanting to take over the project entirely -- leaves them to their work. He picks up the morning paper and settling in an empty armchair a comfortable distance from the hearty fire. The action reminds him of the evening before, Thursday, when he and Paul had shared their customary meal and then sat across from one another by the fire, warming their feet and talking over the loose ends of their week’s work. The conversation had circled around a visit to the pub, perhaps a hill walk, at the weekend. In recent weeks, Paul has been talking about needing to test his balance on more rugged terrain, and Foyle has been reluctant to let him do so alone. That Paul had raised the issue as a discussion, rather than simply going out into the countryside on his own, had not escaped Foyle’s notice.

He’d let himself enjoy the sweet, contented feeling their conversation had settled deep in his belly, like an expertly brewed cup of tea, a domestic task well-executed and to be savored.

He hears Paul now in the kitchen, laughing, and tries not to resent the contrast between the previous evening’s easy companionship and this snowbound farmhouse so full of other people. He shifts in the chair, folding and reopening the paper to the next page, which he’d read over his tea and toast that morning. It’s not that he feels they are unwelcome here. Mrs. Dalby’s hospitality draws from the same well as almost every farm family he’s had occasion to meet -- feeding any warm body you found at the table when you came to the end of a long day’s work.

No, he thinks, turning his irritation over in his mind. It’s not a feeling of unwelcomeness. It’s a feeling of _unease_.

Throughout dinner he had been aware of Paul’s eyes on him where he sat to Mrs. Dalby’s left, discussing the tricks and trials of home gardening in the midst of war. But when he’d let his own gaze be pulled down to where Paul was seated between Sam and little Rosie, Paul would invariably be looking down at his plate, or have his face bent toward Rosie and the stuffed elephant who sat at her elbow.

He and Paul, he realizes, have grown used to sharing the evening meal in solitude. It’s a subtle shift, to be sure, between the work day and what flickers to life on the nights they eat together. Or on the weekend days when a walk turns into a pint turns into an evening by the fire with Paul reading aloud from his weekly library book while Foyle turns a fly, darns a sock, or draws up plans for the following summer’s garden. But a shift it is, nonetheless.

He realizes that, in these more private moments, Paul has ceased to guard his gaze as carefully as he might. That, when they’re together unobserved, he and Paul have become slightly, unspokenly reckless in space -- a hand put out to steady, the passing of a bowl from one to another, press of a knee beneath the table. Like the act of making plans for a Saturday, these touches have become comfortable. He’s let himself expect them. But here, with so many others about, Paul’s been … cautious.

As he should be, Foyle reminds himself. As they both must be, even if nothing more than this ever passes between them. But to have Paul keep careful distance feels _wrong_ , now. It’s making Foyle … irritable.

“I’ll just go and make up the beds, then,” Mrs. Dalby says, coming through from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m afraid it’s a bit crowded here at present, what with Doris and Judy in the spare room. But Miss Stewart can squeeze in with them, and I’ll sleep with Rosie and Frances. That’ll free up the front bedroom for you and Mr. Milner -- it’ll be the best bed for his -- for him,” she catches herself, lowering her voice and glancing over her shoulder at the kitchen door.

She’d noticed, then, how Paul had shifted in his seat during dinner, and the stiff way he’d stood and made his way to the kitchen. The cold and the damp, Foyle’s observed, seems to cause Paul increased discomfort. The night before, a sharp bite to the air, he’d had to close his lips tight around an offer to massage the tension out of Paul’s thigh, to work the jumping muscles smooth and tuck him into bed with a freshly-prepared hot water bottle to soothe the ache he knows never quite leaves.

He’s had to do that more and more often, lately: think carefully before he speaks, discerning fact -- what’s _actually_ happened, or is happening; what he _has_ done, or can do -- from fiction -- what he _wishes_ were to happen, what he  _wishes_ to do. Sometimes his palms itch with inaction. But he wants Paul to find his own way, decide that what Foyle offers is worth the risk. So he bites his lip against the words he wants to say and waits.

He’s so distracted thinking about Paul, that it isn’t until Violet Dalby’s gone again, up the stairs to the second floor, that the meaning of what she’s said actually sinks in. _“It’s the best bed for him.”_ She’s done the eminently sensible thing, putting the two men up in the most easily adaptable room. She’s done the kind thing, thinking of Paul’s injury and where he’ll be most comfortable.

But _Christ_. He’s on his feet before he realizes he’s stood up, thinking to -- but what is there to say that won’t draw attention to the situation and make it ten times worse?

Rosie looks up from the puzzle at his sudden movement. Foyle smiles down at her, automatically, and shoves his hands in his trouser pockets. He crosses to the window and flicks open the curtains just enough to see that the snow is still blowing against the glass. Behind him, the voice on the radio is giving updates from the Greek efforts to push back the Italian invasion, the soft slide of Doris’ knitting needles, the murmur of voices across the hall. He needs to compose himself before he’s faced with a bedroom, a bed, and Paul in it. It’s too close. Too close to -- well.

If Paul is skittish about catching Christopher’s eye over a communal dinner table, sharing a bed in this house will be excruciating. An intimacy he hopes to one day share with Paul, twisted into mockery by being thrust upon them in a situation where nothing more can possibly happen.

* * *

He can’t help Paul up the stairs, Foyle thinks, as they follow Violet Dalby up to the second floor. Paul won’t want him to offer help in front of the others. It’s fifteen steps and he counts every one of them, his eyes on the way Paul places his feet deliberately ahead of Foyle, Paul’s grip on the banister. He acknowledges to himself that he’s perhaps climbing a little more closely behind Paul than strictly wise, though if challenged by anyone he would say he’s just doing his best to safeguard his sergeant against injury.

“I’ve put an extra blanket on the bed,” Mrs. Dalby is saying as she shepherds them down the hall, passed the children’s bedroom, toward the front of the house, “and the chimney from the sitting room fireplace runs straight up the wall behind the bed. Keeps it good and snug, plus I’ve put the bricks down at the foot of the bed, all wrapped in flannel, to keep your feet --” she stumbles over the word, “-- your feet warm.” Foyle wonders if she’s thinking of her husband, currently stationed in north Africa, and whether she’ll be taking care of him like this some day, whether he’ll be coming back to her at all.

In front of him, Paul has come to a halt in the open doorway of what must be the Dalbys’ bedroom and for a split second Foyle considers placing a hand on the small of his back, as he used to do with Rosalind when he found himself behind her, just a way of saying _I’m here_. It’s absolutely not something he’s entitled to do with Paul, and it would be madness to do it in front of someone like Mrs. Dalby in any event. But he imagines himself doing it, and closes his eyes against a rush of momentary certainty that he _has_ done it.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dalby,” Paul is saying, even as she waves the thanks away, “I’m sure Mr. Foyle and I will be perfectly comfortable. You’ve been most kind putting us up.” Foyle finds himself wishing he could see Paul’s face because he can’t read the tone.

“The toilet’s right down there, second door on the right,” Mrs. Dalby says, pointing down the dim hall, “and I’ve put spare towels over the back of the chair,” gesturing into the gently-lit room.

“Thank you,” Foyle says again, firmly, as Paul makes his way stiffly to the loo leaving Foyle and Mrs. Dalby hovering in the bedroom door. He’s hoping this will be enough to make their hostess feel her job here is done. He doesn’t want to be standing there with her when Paul returns down the hall. Perhaps it’s playing with fire, but he’d really prefer they had the room to themselves and the door shut behind them for the night.

There’s a call of _“Mummy --!”_ from the girls’ room, which thankfully ends the exchange by pulling Mrs. Dalby’s attention away from her unexpected guests.

“Sleep well,” she says over her shoulder, “breakfast’s at seven; I’ll send Frances to knock you up.”

As the toilet flushes, muffled by the closed washroom door, Foyle steps into the tidy space that’s to be theirs for the night. The bed, as promised, is piled high with several quilts and wool blankets. It’s backed up against the wall, bracketed to either side by a small bedside table like his own. The table on the left stands empty but for the photograph of a man in uniform, Mr. Dalby, and another family portrait. Judging by the age of the two girls, taken just before Mr. Dalby left for Egypt. The table on the right holds a stack of three books, neatly squared, and the lamp with a painted china shade which is the sole source of light in the room. There’s a wardrobe behind the open door, and a vanity with a mirror, sparsely populated with a tortoiseshell comb, a pot of hand cream and several small jars and boxes that remind him vaguely of Rosalind. The front wall, across the bed from where he's standing, angles low, up under the eaves, with a dormer window looking out toward the drive.

Out of habit, Foyle walks over to the heavy curtains pulled across the windows and checks them to make sure the light is firmly blocked. He can hear the wind, blowing snow against the glass, and feel a seeping cold coming in around the windowpane.

He turns back into the room to see Paul back in the doorway, steadying hand on the painted moulding, watching him with an expression akin to the carefully-guarded glances he’s been giving Foyle all evening. Yet Foyle can see his shoulders are easing. Now that he knows what to look for, he recognizes that look from his front hallway, from when Paul first steps into his kitchen or sitting room. He remembers that look from the night -- that first night -- when they’d stayed up playing checkers and drinking whiskey until past midnight. When he’d made Paul sleep in Andrew’s room, knocking him up the following morning on his way to the kitchen. He remembers clearly the keen awareness he had felt listening to Paul run a bath upstairs while, on the floor below, he sliced Mrs. Briggs’ fresh loaf for toasties.

How he’d refused to allow himself to imagine damp skin flushed by hot water, the scent of his own workaday soap everywhere he longs to touch.

It never goes away entirely, that longing, entangled as it is with his continual awareness of where Paul is in relation to himself. It waxes and wanes and he can feel it getting stronger, now, in the space that stretches out between them. The door is still open into the hall and he can hear Mrs. Dalby herding her daughters toward bed, hears Sam’s voice from down in the sitting room where the three girls are finishing a last game of gin rummy. And all of that feels distant because here’s Paul and they’re standing in a bedroom with a single bed between them, the configuration of the room evoking all of the intimacies of married life that Foyle has been trying not to elaborate upon even in moments of private reflection.

Paul is studying him, from the doorway, eyes no longer sliding away, examining Christopher as if he’s a jigsaw that Paul is determinedly trying to piece together. The look lodges something hopeful in Foyle’s chest, something he draws in a careful breath around. Something new in Paul's expression tonight makes Foyle shove his hands back in his pockets as if without careful monitoring they might take it upon themselves to suggest where a few more pieces might fit in place.

While Foyle watches, Paul opens his mouth as if to speak and then closes it again. He shakes his head almost imperceptibly as if he’s made some internal decision. Releasing the door frame he steps inside the room, his limp more pronounced now that only Foyle is here to see. He makes his way over to the bed and pokes at the stack of books by the lamp. “Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, Pearl Buck --,” he holds up the Christie, “--looking for a gripping read?”

“It was the detective inspector in the parlor with a knitting needle,” Foyle says, attempting levity, and Paul snorts, dropping the book on the bed.

“More like in the kitchen with a bottle of whiskey,” he responds, half to himself, glancing back at Christopher’s face as if to check his expression. Something low in Foyle’s stomach seizes, because this is as close as Paul has come to acknowledging the last few months have been anything but happenstance, have had a purposeful pattern, one that Foyle himself initiated.

Foyle thinks about crossing to Paul’s side, about sliding a palm up Paul’s neck, running a thumb across his cheek, over the curve of his ear, pulling Paul down for a kiss. He thinks about all of the things that a kiss like that could lead to.

Things they can’t possibly explore here.

Paul reaches up to loosen his tie. Foyle clears his throat. “I’ll just -- step out to the washroom,” he says, tilting his head toward the door. He doesn’t trust himself to stay, under the circumstances.

* * *

When Foyle returns to the room, Paul has stripped down to his vest and pants and tucked himself neatly into the left side of the bed. Despite the fact that Foyle had expected this -- had, in fact, lingered at the basin in the washroom in order to give Paul time to settle himself in private -- he acknowledges the keen sense of disappointment he feels, the foreclosure of possibility. He can see where Paul has placed the prosthetic within arm’s reach on his side of the bed, carefully half-shrouded from view behind his discarded clothes folded neatly over the back of a spindle chair. A part of him had wanted Paul to wait for him, to ask for his assistance. He closes his eyes, again, against the longing to help Paul undress -- to undress Paul, layer by layer, to help him ease the prosthetic off his leg and set it aside, press gentle kisses against angry, calloused skin. He can see where Paul’s leg ends, an abrupt drop of the thick coverlet. He resists the urge to put out a hand and caress his knee.

Paul’s sitting up against the headboard holding one of the books that had been sitting on the nightstand.

“ _The Confidential Agent_?” Foyle raises an eyebrow. “Didn’t you read that back in September?” He remembers the dust jacket from its place by Paul’s chair in his living room.

“Best kind of bedtime reading,” Paul smiles up at him, “I already know the ending so I won’t keep myself awake for one more chapter.”

Foyle huffs a laugh and steps around the foot of the bed, shucking off his jacket and unbuttoning his waistcoat. He can feel Paul’s eyes tracking him over the top of the book. He sits down on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes. He’s keenly aware of Paul behind him, and aware of his own decision to undress this way, without turning even enough so that he could see Paul’s posture out of the corner of his eye. Paul might watch him without fear of being observed. Foyle hopes that he will.

He stands, again, to undo his braces. He folds his trousers over the back of the chair closest to hand, unbuttons his shirt. Once again, he’s struck by how routine this feels, even in a house not his own, how easily he can imagine doing this in his own bedroom, Paul waiting for him beneath blankets already warming.

He fumbles the last two buttons on his shirt. It’s feeling more like a cruel joke every moment, Paul in a bed that isn’t his, in a house that affords them no assurance of privacy. It would be a gross violation of Mrs. Dalby’s hospitality to follow through on any of the many, many ways he wants to touch Paul. _But oh, how he wants to._

He folds his shirt over his trousers and turns back to the bed; Paul has his eyes back on his book, but Foyle can see even in the dim light the wash of color on his cheeks, the way his eyes rest on the page without tracking the words. He’s not actually reading.

Foyle folds back the blankets on the unoccupied side of the bed and slides under the bedclothes, feeling the weight of the layered woolen blankets and sturdy handmade quilts settle over his chest and legs, the welcome heat of the flannel-wrapped brick at the end of the bed as it comes in contact with his toes.

He lets himself sigh happily at the warmth against his tired feet. “Did Sam say anything to you about her conversation with Judy and Doris?” he asks, just to break the silence with a mundanity, something to remind them both why they’re here. Sam has a way of eliciting confidences from fellow women in uniform.

“We didn’t have a chance to talk at length,” Paul says, “without the others overhearing, but she gave me to understand there wasn’t anything urgent to pass along.”

“Mmm.” Perhaps Foyle should have asked the desk sergeant he spoke to on the telephone to pass along a report to Norfolk. Too late now and the information (or lack of information) will keep until morning.

“I thought,” Paul says, after a moment’s silence, “I thought, given the weather, that it would be best to delay our excursion tomorrow. But perhaps we could still get a pint?”

“You’re angling for a chance to beat me at darts again,” Foyle murmurs, his eyes closed. Paul has a clear eye and a steady hand, even after a pint of cider to wash down their fish and chips, and their last round several weeks ago had left Paul with a 5-3 advantage. He feels the bed shake gently as Paul laughs, turning a page in the book he’s not reading. “Not like you to pass up a challenge,” Paul offers softly in response.

Foyle cracks an eye to consider Paul, backlit by the bedside lamp. “No,” he says, after a moment, “certainly not when the challenge involves you.”

Paul turns another page in his book, then another, and Foyle waits to see if he’ll find words with which to respond.

He drifts off to sleep, still waiting.

* * *

Foyle wakes in the night to the absence of wind. The storm has ceased. _Good_ , he thinks. They’ll be able to start clearing the roads at first light, and they’ll be back in Hastings by mid-day. The darkness is the pitch black that, in Foyle’s youth, he associated with holidays spent at his grandparents’ farm in Kent. These days, it’s the pitch black of a blackout night.

He hears the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall strike quarter past the hour, but has no way of knowing how long he’s been asleep. He often wakes once or twice in the night, even when there are no air raids to disrupt his sleep. He lies in the pocket of warmth his body has generated, considering the relative merits of emptying his bladder versus the overnight chill of the farmhouse; at least the Dalbys have indoor plumbing.

He slips out of the bed and fumbles on stocking feet in the direction of the door, moving as quietly as he can across unfamiliar floorboards. There’s a soft creak of wood as he finds the edge of the worn braided rug, then his hand is against the wallpaper, feeling his way across to the latch on the door and out into the hall. He makes his way to the loo and back, returning to the bedroom a few minutes later and reversing his steps to the side of the bed, slipping back in under the blankets where residual warmth is there to greet chilled skin.

Beside him, Paul murmurs and shifts in his sleep, rolling onto his side toward Foyle. Foyle wants nothing more than to mould himself into that invitation, turning to fit himself into the curve of Paul’s chest and thighs. Under cover of darkness he lets himself imagine the weight of Paul against his back, the particular heat in his groin nestled snug against the curve of Christopher’s arse. He imagines Paul wrapping an arm around him, sleepy yet sure, sliding a hand down Christopher’s arm from shoulder to wrist, settling under Christopher’s palm where he might cradle Paul’s long, expressive fingers against his chest like a secret.

Rosalind used to run hot at night, to Christopher’s cool, and in the winters she would pull him into her body against his half-hearted protestations, holding him so that he could feel her breasts against his shoulder blades, the soft curve of her belly against the small of his back, her knees tucked in against the backs of his own. She was taller than he was by several inches, a fact about which friends used to tease him when they first started courting.

When she first got sick with the typhoid that would kill her, they had never suspected. All three of them had been inoculated regularly after the outbreak of ‘24 after all, and Rosalind’s work as a nurse had lulled them into a dangerous sense of security: she was exposed to communicable diseases on a daily basis and rarely got sick herself. It was while lying awake on the second night of her fever, feeling the heat radiate off her skin as she pushed restlessly at the bedclothes in her sleep, that Foyle had realized that something was terribly wrong. He’d telephoned for Dr. McKay at four in the morning and the doctor, grim-faced, had sent her to hospital directly upon examination.

She’d never returned to the house, to their bedroom. He’d climbed into the hospital bed, near the end, to hold her shuddering body; it was her hands and feet, cold and clammy to the touch, that had made it clear to Foyle the inevitability of her death.

“They’ll tell you the pain lessens over time,” he remembers a neighbor, Mrs. Pettigrew, telling him a few months later, when he still felt like every day was an exercise in going through the motions of feeding himself and continuing to work for Andrew if not for himself. “They’re wrong.”

She’d lost a fiance in the Great War, eight years before marrying the vicar who’d been assigned to the church up the road from where he and Rosalind had purchased their home in Hastings. That home had felt unbearably empty in the weeks after Rosalind’s death, despite the presence of neighbors stopping by to look in on him and Andrew. There has been a nearly endless stream of neighbors that year, bringing a warm meal to the grieving widower, offering to take Andrew to the beach or the cinema with their own children on a Saturday afternoon. At times he’d felt he would go mad from lack of solitude if the loneliness didn’t kill him first.

“The pain never goes away,” Mrs. Pettigrew had told him, looking him straight in the eye as if knowing this is a reality he needs to hear, a reality that will somehow save him. “You’ve lost someone unique, someone you loved in a way you will love no one else -- who loved you in a way, a _specific_ way, you will never be loved again. How can the pain of that ever stop?” She’d paused to sip her tea, look out toward the garden where Andrew and her daughter Penelope were playing with Andrew’s model airplanes. “But you realize, over time, that it won’t actually kill you, unless you let it. And that the pain of it can co-exist with other … that taking joy in life, and finding pleasure, building new relationships, it doesn’t cheapen or compete with what you’ve lost.”

She’d slid a hand across the table, then, and pressed it gently against his wrist. They had regarded one another in shared understanding. Nothing more needed to be said.

At the time, many people had assumed he would remarry after a suitable period of mourning -- to provide Andrew with a mother, perhaps for companionship. But when Foyle pursued none of their suggestions it was a matter soon dropped. The neighborly visits subsided, though a few -- like Mrs. Pettigrew and Mrs. Briggs -- who had begun coming by out of pity stayed on to become true friends. Foyle discovered, over time, that the pain of loneliness could settle alongside the pleasure of solitude in such a way that the loneliness was bearable. And he came to realize, over time, that simply rejecting solitude was no remedy for the loneliness he felt.

He hasn’t wanted anyone to keep him warm in bed at night since Rosalind. Until Paul.

Paul is so close in the blackness that Foyle can feel Paul’s breath on his cheek. The rhythm is slow and easy; Foyle doesn’t think Paul actually woke when Foyle returned to the bed, or if he did he’s lapsed back into slumber. Foyle lies on his back staring up at the ceiling, trying to match his breath to Paul’s and waiting for himself to fall back asleep.

 _“Mmmph,”_ Paul makes a small, sleepy muttering sound in the back of his throat, and shifts even closer, as if trying to shift away from a lump in the mattress. Then, _“Ah-mmm --”_ he rolls forward slightly, and Foyle feels a warm hand slide over his stomach and up along his sternum. Suddenly, far from near-sleep he’s wide awake in the stillness of the snowbound night. Paul’s breathing hasn’t changed, so he’s either reaching out in his dreams or under cover of pretended sleep. Christopher wonders if, assuming the latter, Paul can feel the stuttering of his breath, the sudden pounding of his heart in his chest. He forces himself to breathe in and breathe out, evening the rhythm, fearing the slightest undeniable reaction might startle Paul and break whatever spell is pulling them together.

Paul’s hand comes to rest with his fingertips grazing the jut of Foyle’s right collar bone, beneath the thin cloth of his vest. Foyle can feel Paul’s forearm and elbow heavy across his chest, and it doesn’t escape his notice that the weight has loosened something in his chest, allowing him to breathe more easily than he has since Mrs. Dalby had shown them upstairs to this room.

With great care, Christopher slides his own hand, the right one, up from his side along the bone and flesh of Paul’s forearm, letting his fingers close around muscle, feeling the tickle of fine hair against his palm. He allows himself to grip Paul’s wrist, gently, firmly, posing a wordless question. The hitch in Paul’s breathing is enough to confirm that Paul isn’t too asleep to notice the touch. He feels Paul still against him. But when Foyle doesn’t move to pull Paul’s hand away, instead lets his fingers rest loosely curled around Paul’s wrist, Paul lets out a near-silent breath that still manages to be almost a sob. Foyle begins gently stroking the knob of Paul’s wrist bone with his thumb, and Paul’s body relaxes into Foyle’s by degrees.

So they lie: tangled, however tentatively, together in silence. The only sound apart from the inhale and exhale of breathing, and the flutter of pulse Foyle can feel deep in his own eardrums, is the soft _shuff_ as his hand moves against the sheet. Back and forth. Back and forth. Paul’s wrist feels fragile, under his hand, and Christopher thinks about how that wrist had looked pale against the beige of Milner’s hospital bed. About all the things he’s watched that wrist accomplish in the months since that first visit to the recovery ward.

He closes his eyes against the watchful night and lets himself sink into the weight of Paul’s body against him. Paul is pinning Foyle’s left arm awkwardly to his side, and Paul’s face seems dangerously close to his own; unless Foyle’s sense of space is distorted by the darkness, if he turned his head to the left he would be able to press a kiss against Paul’s forehead, or cheek, or --

But for tonight, he allows himself the pleasure of a hand against a wrist, the feeling of Paul’s arm rising and falling with every breath, and the surety of Paul’s fingertips curled against the bare skin of his neck.

He wonders if they’ll speak of this in the morning, if this is Paul’s decision made, the puzzle pieced together and Christopher’s invitation accepted. Or whether this is Paul allowing himself a taste of something, perhaps desperately wanted, that he will only ever let himself have under the multiple covers of happenstance and sleep -- a shared bed in a snowstorm, an unexpected bed-mate, perhaps the fictive excuse of reaching for a wife no longer there. Foyle will never force the issue, he knows that already. The decision will have to be Paul’s, whether and how much to risk his career, his social reputation, potentially his freedom. Foyle finds age comes with certain benefits as well as losses, one of them being that you simply have less to lose. Paul is a cautious man, by nature, and may decide this is all he can willingly share.

Foyle allows himself the luxury of unknowing, and drifts slowly back into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU to my lovely betas and co-challenge fic authors [Crowgirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/crowgirl) and [Kivrin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kivrin). All remaining errors are my own.
> 
> Coventry Cathedral was [destroyed in a blitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz) on 14 November 1940. If you don’t see why I felt compelled to work in a mention, I encourage you to [brush up on your Connie Willis](http://www.tor.com/2010/06/24/academic-time-travel-connie-willis-to-say-nothing-of-the-dog/).
> 
> The image on the children’s puzzle is from [_Four Little Kittens_](http://tparty.typepad.com/the_tcozy/2013/03/four-little-kittens-possibly-the-cutest-book-ever.html) (1934). [This](http://tparty.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8345159f569e2017d425b50a4970c-800wi) is the image I had in mind. Random fact: My grandmother had a copy of this book as a child and used to read it to us when we were little. I hope my parents still have it somewhere.


End file.
